Re-organizing live rock. Experienced pointers very welcome!

[UrbanSage]

I am thinking about taking all my live rock out of my 75 gallon tank (about 125lbs total) this comming weekend.

My current aquascape looks to me like a bunch of rocks piled up. Plus I am running out of spots for my corals and bad planning has caused some corals to be too close together now that they have grown.

My hope is to end up with two islands if possible connected by an arch.
NEED BIGGER TANK!

I am looking for ideas and headsup's from people who has done this.

I have 2 x 25 gallon rubbermaids I also use for mixing saltwater. I think all the LR will fit in those. I am thinking about detaching most coral from the LR and place them in a 20 gallon tank with a heater while this is going on.

I have about 1.5" aragonite substrate. I am planning on "raking" it to get rid of the billions of empty shells and other large debris, should I syphon the sand at the same time? Or will this possibly end up releasing so much crap I could hurt my tank after the reorg?
I will probably also add some fine aragonite sand as this would be the first time in 1.5 years I have added any sand.

Current setup (Although old picture).

 

[UrbanSage]

bump.

 

[trippyl]

I did it in order to remove a saron shrimp that was nipping corals. I used the opportunity to do a bit of cleaning and reorganizing as well. I also went with the two island approach and love it. I can give some advice:

- Wear gloves. Seriously. it's just not safe to touch all that stuff in your system.

- make up more saltwater than you think you will need.

- have enough buckets on hand to hold everything

- rather than detach corals from the rocks, use one container to hold rocks (base rocks), another to hold the coral rocks. You may actually need two containers (shallow ones) to hold all of your corals with rocks properly (you don't want to stack em). I bet you will find that many of the corals already attached to rocks would be fine in the new setup as is, and only some need to actually be removed from the rock they are on.

- be prepared for some dieoff of the corals.

- fill the buckets with the tank water first, then place the rocks in the buckets. Once everything is out of the tank, try to siphon out as much crap as possible. Ideally, you should have enough make up water on hand to replace all of the water that's been removed from the system (whatever was in the buckets, and what you took out for cleaning).

- get some chemi pure, poly filters, carbon, etc and be prepared to run this in the system to help absorb a bunch of what's been kicked up.

- think about installing starboard or egg crate to help give a base to the rockwork so that falling rocks don't hit the bottom of the tank directly

- think about siphoning out some of the sand (you don't have to go BB)

 

[trippyl]

Here's a few more ideas:

- You should also have an idea of where you want to place things. You will find that once you start removing rocks, the tank will get cloudy quick. Visibility in the tank will be very poor. You are going to be working somewhat blind when putting the rocks back in.

- if you use two containers for the corals (and one more for base rock), try segregating the corals at that time so you know what corals go on which mound.

- you don't need a powerhead or a heater in the buckets unless you plan on this process taking over 6 or 7 hours or unless you live in alaska. In fact, you might want to avoid using a heater or a PH because the heater could break or the PH could suck in loose corals. it's simply not needed the corals will be fine for less than 12 hours in a bucket.

- don't get worried, I'd say about halfway through, you are gonna feel like this task was more than you could handle. It's not. Stick with it and see it through!

 

[LOTUS50GOD]

What I did was use zipties to make larger rocks and unique shapes. I also took a grinder and made some flat spots to join rocks together and give better support on the bottom.

 

[UrbanSage]

Thanks for the ideas.

I was thinking about drilling some holes and use acrylic rods to stabilize the rock work.

 

[trippyl]

I used large diameter PVC couplings and pieces and used that to give myself a base with which I was able to construct two nice mounds of rock. I didn't want to go the drilling route because reorging the tank as it is is a tremendous amount of work, and very messy.

The two mounds of rock in my tank are very stable, but rely on their weight and placement to hold them together. Obviously the drilling/rod route is much more stable.